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'Songline contraband', a new poem by Samuel Wagan Watson

by
August 2019, no. 413

'Songline contraband', a new poem by Samuel Wagan Watson

by
August 2019, no. 413

    Vale Aunty Kerry Reed-Gilbert 
    Long-serving Chair of the First Nations of Australia Writers Network

 

Authorised visits,
temporarily easing Grafton Correctional Centre blues,
a young girl walks shadow-hardened corridors to see a black inmate,
observe her little brown fingers
as wafer thin as the bars that separate them
but with pilot eyes, the only light that shines
lines across a dank cell floor
upon which an imprisoned father writes poetry,
a daughter smuggles out to be published;
highly unauthorised material,
                                                 songline contraband ...

Samuel Wagan Watson

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